Oct 31, 2013

The big non-news story today sees Brussels trying to banish "the traditional British breakfast" by meddling with our jam. The EU is hell-bent on allowing fruit spreads which contain just 50 per cent sugar - as opposed to the 60
per cent used in traditional jam recipes - to be
marketed as "jam".

The horror.

It's worth being clear that jam as we know it will in no way
be affected, yet the media are still trying hard to look like they give a toss. The Express, Telegraph, Mirror and Sky News are all running the story.

Under the entirely misleading headline 'EU threatens future
of British jam', the Express reports:

"EU
rules cutting the amount of sugar in jam could
bring an end to the traditional British breakfast…"

No
hyperbole there then.

"Lib Dem MP Tessa Munt … told MPs that consumers would be left
confused if producers were able to sell products labelled as jam when they were only 50 per cent
sugar as their consistency would be similar to inferior European fruit spreads
that often "tasted like mud", MPs heard."

Those inferior European spreads, coming over here, stealing
our breakfast.

Oct 22, 2013

Rarely do the right wing press get to combine two of their biggest dislikes - immigration and the BBC - in one story.

But the Telegraph has managed it this morning. Under the headline: "BBC criticised over rare migrant birds featured in 'Tweet of the Day'" the Telegraph reports:

"Radio 4 listeners have woken to the melodious sound of birdsong since the station began its early morning Tweet of the Day slot earlier this year to educate the nation about the calls of British species. However, some wildlife lovers have been left annoyed that the producers have chosen to include rare migrant birds that only stop in the UK for a few weeks of the year."

"One frustrated listener, wrote: "I don't class these birds as British, so why are we listening to them?"

I don't know, these foreign birds, coming over here, eating our worms, happy to take our nuts and berries, yet they refuse to learn how to sing in English... etc.

Oct 19, 2013

When England last had a vacancy for a new football manager The Sun was clear on who should get the job. Back in February 2012 the paper told the Football Association to give the job to Sun columnist Harry Redknapp.

But the FA ignored The Sun's pleas and gave the job instead to Roy Hodgson whose England team have now qualified for the World Cup without losing a single game.

So has The Sun graciously conceded the FA got it right with Hodgson? Have they forgiven the FA for snubbing their candidate?

Maybe not. Since England qualified The Sun has been trying to embroil Hodgson in a race row after the England boss reportedly told an odd joke at half time during England's crunch match against Poland.

The joke involves an astronaut, on a space mission with a trained NASA monkey, who quickly realises he is only there to feed the monkey. It was apparently a very clumsy way of telling some of the England team that their only role was to get the ball to Andros Townsend who played a starring role in England's two recent qualifying matches.

The Sun's front page splash, 17 October 2013.

Was it a clumsy choice of words? Definitely. Was it a rubbish joke? Without doubt. Did Hodgson over-estimate the modern footballer's appetite for analogy? Almost certainly. But should it have been splashed all over the front page and two inside pages of a national newspaper sparking talk of racism and division in the England camp? Not according to Andros Townsend:

Andros Townsend was apparently as baffled as everybody else by The Sun's coverage. The paper didn't name a single player or member of the England set-up who was offended by Hodgson's joke.

The Sun isn't the only paper trying a little too hard to create an artificial story arc around England's World Cup qualification. After the highs of Tuesday night, celebrated in Wednesday's papers, Metro decided by Thursday it was time to start pouring some cold water on things.

Under the front page headline "Terror alert over World Cup gangs", Metro reported: "Supporters heading to South America next summer are said to
be under threat from the notorious First Capital Of The Command crime
syndicate."

But this scare story didn't have the desired effect on Mark Perryman, a representative of an England supporters group who was quoted in the paper saying:

"We had a wonderful time in South Africa and Ukraine,
and I'm sure we'll have a wonderful time in Brazil. They've got some social
problems, get over it."

That didn't leave the Metro anywhere else to go with that negative line of enquiry, so it changed tack.

"However, England fans may well be robbed blind by
travel agencies, which are said to be ramping up prices for flights and hotels
during the tournament.

So to sum up the week in front page news: A man told a rubbish joke, Brazil has some criminal gangs and hotels put their prices up around major events. Shocking stuff.

Oct 16, 2013

The Daily Mail is worried about the number of women becoming doctors. Under a headline claiming there are "fears for care
standards as junior doctors fall pregnant", the paper reports:

"Three out of five young doctors on hospital wards and in GP surgeries are women. They made up 61 per cent of doctors under 30 last year and 46 per cent of those aged 30 to 50."

The paper tells us these "new figures are likely to fuel fears about the impact of increasing numbers of female doctors on struggling hospital wards" which in the context of the Mail's
article sounds like an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, the Mail's concern seems not to stretch to all jobs. For example, 90 per cent of nurses are female but the Mail doesn't seem so worried about them. What's more, 88 per cent of primary school teachers and 62 per cent of secondary school teachers are female, yet the Mail isn't warning of a crisis in our schools.

Could it be the Mail thinks nursing and teaching are more fitting jobs for women to do until they decide to knock all that career nonsense on the head and start a family but aspiring to be a doctor is a step too far?

Anachronistic

Certainly the Mail has never made a great secret of its belief that a woman's place is in the home bringing up kids rather than in the workplace doing things like being a doctor. Though rather than state something quite so anachronistic so plainly it often chooses to gnaw away at issues which are directly linked to the decision to return to work after having children.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the paper's regular attempts to undermine the decision to put children into nursery - the only option for many working parents, men and women.

Consider a front page story from earlier this year about "unruly toddlers" roaming feral and out of control around the nurseries of Britain:

On the face of it, it was a story about under-performing nurseries which are "breeding a generation of toddlers with no manners... 'running around with no sense of purpose'". But tellingly there wasn't a single shred of evidence to suggest nurseries are under-performing.

It appears to have been an attempt to undermine confidence in nurseries and by association criticise those people who choose to put their children into nursery in order to go back to work.

And it was not a standalone cheap shot. Consider such Daily Mail headlines as:

Working mothers risk damaging their child's prospects

Children of working mothers lag behind

Working mothers weaken bond

'Working mothers are to blame if their children misbehave' says a leading psychologist

In 2008 the Mail claimed there was some science behind such alarmist headlines:

"The bad behaviour of children who have spent long hours in nursery care rubs off on their classmates when they start school, say researchers. Those who spend time in centre-based care from a very young age are particularly at risk."

Their source was a Professor Jay Belsky who they quoted again later that same year:

"Professor Jay Belsky warned that toddlers who spend long hours in nurseries or with childminders suffer 'disconcerting' effects."

David Cameron has criticised the Guardian and suggested the paper may be investigated by a Commons Select Committee for its coverage of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Cameron said the newspaper "has damaged national security" by revealing the extent to which personal conversations and online transactions are being monitored by
security forces.

Speaking at Prime Minister's questions, Cameron said: "The plain fact is that what has happened has damaged national security."

However, it should be noted Cameron did not present any proof to
support his "plain fact" and it seems rather naïve - or possibly deliberately misleading - to suggest that for all the sophisticated spying systems being used by the UK and US other countries might rely solely upon what appears in the Guardian for their intelligence.

It may be Cameron's opinion and one he shares with the Daily Mail
and MI5 chief Andrew Parker but that doesn't mean it is true. But then why would
Cameron let that put him off the chance to put the boot in to the Guardian.

Tory MP David Davis has been touring the media on behalf of fellow Conservative Andrew Mitchell who lost his chief whip's job after becoming embroiled in the so-called "plebgate" controversy.

Mitchell claims he was the victim of a series of lies but in telling this tale of alleged police troublemaking his colleague David Davis seems to have lost all sense of perspective.

Speaking on Newsnight, Davis likened Mitchell's situation to the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, who were all wrongly convicted of IRA bombings and served up to 16 years each in prison.

Earlier in the day, speaking on Channel 4 News, Davis likened Mitchell's situation to the injustices faced by vitims of the Hillsborough disaster and the wrongful killing of Jean Charles De Menezes who was shot dead by police.

Oct 13, 2013

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has broken his silence on the paper's controversial hatchet job on Ralph Miliband and took the opportunity while he was at it also to criticise the BBC, the Left, the "Twitter mob", "metropolitan classes" and "the London chatterati".

Dacre's words - all written in the strained cliches of a Daily Mail editorial, lapsing at times into the realms of parody - appeared in the Daily Mail though the piece was also carried by the Guardian where it will reach far more of its intended targets: from "the Twitter mob who the BBC absurdly thinks represent the views of real Britain" to individuals such as "an ever more rabid Alastair Campbell".

At the time of writing it is the most read article on the Guardian's website but appears nowhere in the Daily Mail's list of most read stories. Mail readers seem more interested in the "al fresco sex capital of Britain" and the private life of a former footballer.

Whatever reasonable points there might be about the risk of taking Twitter storms entirely at face value, these are lost in a sea of paranoia and conspiracy theories about "a liberal-left consensus that dominates British life". It is also rich in trademark hypocrisy from the very first line:

"Out in the real world, it was a pretty serious week for news... In contrast, the phoney world of Twitter, the London chatterati and Left-wing media was gripped... by collective hysteria as it became obsessed round-the-clock by one story... in the Daily Mail."

Of course Dacre is right, there were more important stories (al fresco sex hotspots and footballers' love-lives notwithstanding) but we would be here all week if we were to start listing the occasions when the Mail has ignored more serious matters itself in favour of trying to whip up outrage about issues such as comedians making smutty jokes after the watershed.

The comic hyperbole lends it a pantomime quality from start to finish. The online version should probably have come with an audio track of people booing and hissing when we reach the bit about "a full-scale war by the BBC and the left". There should be raucous peels of ironic laughter as Dacre accuses the BBC of lacking "journalistic proportionality".

Out of touch

Overall Dacre seems desperately out of touch - and not just because at one point he exclaims "by golly" like a rum cove from a PG Wodehouse story. He says "the hysteria" which followed his paper's hatchet job on Ralph Miliband "is symptomatic of the post-Leveson age in which any newspaper which dares to take on the left in the interests of its readers risks being howled down".

But what Dacre fails to acknowledge is the fact his own readers thought the paper made a serious error of judgement in its attack on Miliband. They didn't feel it was in their interests.

However Dacre tries to paint it, this isn't about right and left. It's about right and wrong. What the Mail wrote was wrong and they got called out for it by people on both sides of the political spectrum, right and left.

Dacre's ranting arguments are lazily constructed and outdated, including his heavy over-reliance upon hackneyed and disproven claims of a left wing bias at the BBC.

In hindsight, it might have been the kindest thing for the paper after all if their editor had maintained his silence.

Oct 09, 2013

A number of newspapers, including the Telegraph, Times
and Daily Mail, have picked up on comments from MI5 boss Sir Andrew Parker who suggested the Guardian
has jeapordised "the safety of this country and its citizens" by lifting the
lid on the extent of secret surveillance operations by GCHQ:

The Mail's list of accusations levelled against the
Guardian includes:

"[The Guardian] revealed how GCHQ was able to hoover up vast amounts of personal information,
including websites visited, emails sent and received, text messages, calls and
passwords..."

Which is clearly in the public interest.

The Mail goes on to remind readers that "David Cameron
authorised the destruction of computers at The Guardian offices" and "sent
Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to demand that Guardian editor Alan
Rusbridger destroy files".

The Mail clearly believes the government was right to try to silence and intimidate The Guardian.

Meanwhile over at The Telegraph, the paper claims:

"Sources find it incomprehensible that exposing spy agency
techniques for tracking terrorists has been argued to be in the public
interest... and it is understood the Guardian continued to expose the information
despite pleas from the Government not to reveal intelligence techniques."

The Telegraph clearly believes the government should have
been able to silence the Guardian, despite a Telegraph editorial earlier this week
which stated:

"A free press is one that is free from government or
political interference… For all their protestations to the contrary, our
politicians are proposing to bring back statutory press control for the first
time in more than 300 years. This is unacceptable."

...unless the government is trying to hush up the Guardian, in which
case that's OK apparently.

The Daily Mail too is aggressively opposed to any state
interference in the media. Earlier this week the paper was quick to run a quote
from Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors and one of the
few people to stand up for the Mail in the wake of its hatchet job on Ralph
Miliband. Satchwell told the Mail:

"An editor should be free to edit the papers in the way that
he wants."

…unless it's the Guardian's editor, in which case, that's
different apparently.

With such ifs, buts and exceptions it's no wonder some papers want a system of self-regulation. It would certainly make it a lot
easier to make it up as they go along.

Oct 06, 2013

The Daily Mail was wrong to slander dead war veteran Ralph Miliband according to the Daily Mail's own readers.

Polling organisation YouGov claims 60 per cent of Mail readers surveyed think the language of the paper's unsubstantiated attack - specifically branding Ralph Miliband a "man who hated Britain" - was wrong. What's more, 50 per cent of Mail readers surveyed think any posthumous criticisim of Ralph Miliband's views and politics in an attempt to undermine his son was unacceptable and 57 per cent think the paper should apologise.

Looking at the nation as a whole, the response of the public to the Mail's hatchet job is even more unequivocal.

Nearly three quarters of Brits polled by YouGov (72 per cent) think the Mail's attack was unacceptable.

The Mail's attempt to smear Ed Miliband and his father has certainly backfired, not least because YouGov's research suggests the Labour leader is more popular as a result. More than three quarters (78 per cent) of those polled think Ed Miliband was right to complain to the Mail and a quarter of people say they now view Ed Miliband more positively. (See the full YouGov data tables here).

Oct 04, 2013

Remember when the Daily Mail got all angry about Channel 4's Big Fat Quiz of the Year? They hated the jokes, they hated the comedians and they hated Channel 4 for broadcasting it. And what seemed to infuriate them more than anything was the refusal of Channel 4 bosses to come out and publicly explain themselves.

The Mail reported at the time:

"Only one board member... responded to ...requests
for a comment, saying only that it was not up to the board to make 'creative'
decisions. The C4 press office said its board members would not be making any
comment. It repeated a request for us not to contact its chairman Lord Burns
and said its chief executive David Abraham was still on holiday..."

This really riled the Daily Mail. So much so they launched a name and shame campaign against Channel 4's board, including publishing their photos and salaries:

This is just one example of the Daily Mail demanding "bosses", "chiefs" and "top brass" face the music when their organisation is under fire.

So far the Mail's sketch writer, deputy editor and city editor have stepped forward to face the onslaught of criticism, yet the man who is ultimately in charge is nowhere to be seen. Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail has been missing in action since the story kicked off.

Oct 03, 2013

The Daily Express and The Daily Star, owned by Richard Desmond are today putting the boot in to the fact the Camelot-owned National Lottery is doubling the price of its tickets to £2 this weekend.

The Express reports:

"A poll carried out to coincide with the hike revealed 78 per cent of Lotto customers say the increase in price is unfair."

The survey was carried out on behalf of the Health Lottery, owned by Richard Desmond. But you'd guessed that already. The Express talks of "furious players" threatening to boycott the National Lottery.

If only there was another lottery they could play.

But wait, the Daily Star reports:

"Brits who like a flutter can rest easy: charity rival the Health Lottery has vowed to keep its ticket price at £1."

And that's not even the most shameless bit. The Daily Star adds:

"Health Lottery chiefs estimate that if they were awarded the National Lottery contract, they could raise £1 billion more for good causes."

Oddly, that bold estimate wasn't challenged at all. If only they'd known they'd get such an easy ride, they could have gone for "£20 trillion".

The Express goes on to criticise the television advertising for the National Lottery. Presumably they think Camelot should just buy a couple of newspapers and get them to do the advertising for free.

Oct 02, 2013

Proving there may be no depth it won't scrape, the Daily Mail has picked a very public fight with Ed Miliband, publishing a hatchet job on the Labour leader's dead father.

It then responded by allowing Miliband a
right to reply but framed his response with two more hatchet jobs on Ralph Miliband:

The Mail's editorial began:

"RED ED'S in a strop with the Mail... Doubtless, he's miffed that his conference was overshadowed by the revelations of his former friend, the spin doctor Damian McBride... Nor did he see the funny side when we ridiculed the yucky,
lovey-dovey photographs of him and his wife, behaving like a pair of hormonal
teenagers... But what has made him vent his spleen - indeed, he has stamped his feet and demanded a right of reply - is a Mail article… about the Labour leader's late father, Ralph, under the arresting headline 'The Man Who Hated Britain'."

Impressively, the Mail's apparent surprise at someone being offended by a newspaper attempting to trash the reputation of a dead family member is not the stupidest thing about the article. Far from it in fact.

There's the Mail's entire argument for starters.

They've pieced together things Ralph Miliband wrote, starting with a diary entry when he was aged just 17 – an age at which young men probably dislike many things. It also claims his writing suggests he didn't like the monarchy, the church, the Falklands War or the British public school system - none of which amounts to hating or even being indifferent to Britain.

He may not have liked the Daily Mail's anachronistic right-wing Christian conservative view of Britain but he's not alone in that.

The Mail then shifts from offensive to preposterous, appearing to suggest that as a Marxist, Miliband senior should somehow shoulder some blame for the attrocities of Stalin.

At this point it seems only fair game to point out the Mail could hardly be in a worse position to start digging in the history books for mud to sling at people's dead relatives because while Ralph Miliband fought the Nazis, the Daily Mail's founder posed for photos with them and openly supported the cause of European fascism:

Viscount Rothermere poses for a friendly photograph with Adolf Hitler. Rothermere's family still owns the Daily Mail to this day.

Viscount Rothermere's rallying cry for European fascism.

Of
course, the Mail's rather over-reaching hatchet job on Ralph Miliband was not without a very self-serving agenda... and here it comes:

"More chillingly, the father's disdain for freedom of expression can be seen in his son's determination to place the British Press under statutory control."

Slagging off a dead man seems a strange way to make a point about why the press should be allowed to regulate itself.

A final, baffling lowlight in the Mail's article was its attack on Miliband's "close involvement with degenerates such as Damian McBride". This of course is the same "degenerate" with which the Daily Mail has recently had a close involvement, paying McBride a six-figure sum to publish extracts of his memoirs.